


they that do not deserve the light

by potted_music



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-13
Packaged: 2020-04-08 12:06:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19106770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potted_music/pseuds/potted_music
Summary: Valera soon discovers that this entire business of being dead is a dreadful slog.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> 1) It’s fanfiction based on the series, not RPS, specifically using the facts from the series that do deviate from history. No disrespect, etc.
> 
> 2) If Chernobyl (HBO) fanfiction isn't your cuppa, please remember that life’s too short and brutal to waste it on rage-reading and ranting about the content you don’t like. I sincerely recommend unsubscribing and reading the content that does make you happy instead. Let’s all act like civilized adults in charge of our own media consumption. Ta! <3
> 
> 3) English isn’t my first language, this is unbetaed and very hastily written.

OCTOBER 1988

The bus spits him out on a small square, hemmed in by the village council building, a school that looks like a shoebox someone has stepped on with intent and malice, and a small grocery store. He pauses in front of the monument to the unknown hero of WW II. The chicken perched on the soldier's head clucks and eyes him with alien avian menace.

"We be one blood, thou and I," he thinks with sudden sympathy for the granite soldier. He always thought these hulking figures, chins thrust out and one leg frozen forever in eternal march, thousands upon thousands of near identical effigies scattered across villages throughout the country, made a mockery of scared, underfed, ill-equipped, broken boys they were supposed to represent. Funny how his optics changed now that he himself was being whittled down to an image that could be consumed by the country that never learned to grieve, and was taught to eschew doubt.

( _"We’d have avoided so much trouble if you were dead and quiet, you know," said the director of his institute matter-of-factly. “Like those three that dived under the reactor. You don’t hear them mouthing off about what they saw, now do you?”_

_"But they are alive. It’s all rumours, right? Or rumours and propaganda, anyway. Never was a story better than of heroic self-sacrifice, and all that."_

_"Exactly."_ )

The country feeds on dead heroes; it’s the uncomfortable reality of doubting, ailing, failing bodies of the living that it doesn’t know how to deal with. Irreverently, Valera’s stomach chooses this moment to give a low rumble. It’s getting late in the day. He finally tears his gaze away from the monument, picks up his briefcase, and strolls over to the grocery store. He still has a couple of hardboiled eggs and a can of sprats left from the journey, but he’d better buy something more substantial to eat before looking for the new home assigned to him.

He rattles at the store’s door. It remains obstinately closed.

"The bread is brought on Monday and Thursday," says the voice right behind him. He jumps. He could swear that the square was empty not a moment earlier, and the tone is so uncompromising that its harsh disembodied quality makes it sound like a divine commandment: thou shalt be given thy daily bread (Monday and Thursday only). Turning around and almost toppling down the short flight of stairs leading to the grocery’s door, he finds himself facing a tiny old woman with a toddler in tow.

"It's Friday," he says helplessly.

"You'll buy what you need on Monday then."

He cannot fault her logic, even if her tone could be friendlier.

“Thank you,” he says, and adds, “I’m sorry.”

He’s not sure what he’s apologizing for: for the inconvenient shop hours, or for his intrusion into this somnolent space, or for everything that led to him landing here. Whatever the case, the old lady takes the apology for a sign of weakness, and, letting go of the toddler’s hand, plants her hands on her hips, and narrows her eyes.

"What brings you here?" she asks suspiciously, as if he was a small boy she caught climbing her apple tree.

"Chernobyl. Doctors said I needed fresh-"

Before he has a chance to finish the sentence, the old lady yanks the toddler back and whispers something furiously in a language he barely understands. The word “Chernobyl” is repeated several times. Fair enough, he thinks. At least someone’s taking radiation seriously.

As she hurries angrily off, he calls after her,

“Wait, how do I get to 12 Komsomol Street?”

Wordlessly, she waves at the other side of the river, where the wooded mountains loom over a row of houses. Slung across the river is a swaying suspension bridge with flimsy rope handholds. And here he was thinking that his day couldn’t get any worse. 

Stopping in front of the bridge, he eyes the drop. The river’s shallow yet fast, whispering over boulders three meters below. He puts one foot on the bridge to check if it’s stable, and the whole structure starts moving. He’s old, is Valera. Not if you go by the passport, but his body has grown brittle and overcautious. He scares easily, and he fears pain, even though he knows that there’s no escaping it.

Swallowing hard, he takes a decisive step onto the bridge, clutching at the handhold with all he has. His hand, which hasn’t worked properly in a while, slips a bit as the monkey bridge sways under him. The ropes dance, tugging at unpleasant memories.

( _They let him choose his own legend, the story that will pass into urban folklore. The guilt-ridden hero- no, that’s not right, that’s too romantic. A man plagued by radiation sickness, sparing himself the inevitable suffering, hangs himself? That’ll do nicely. No, let’s spare himself the indignity of a swollen tongue and all the other unpleasantness that comes with the hanging: he shoots himself with his service revolver. Clean, one bullet through the heart. That sounds just about right._

 _Choosing the story sometimes feels too close to choosing the real thing. He quickens his pace every time he walks past his desk where the revolver lies tempting. He doesn’t know, not for a fact, that he won’t do it, not till the very last moment when he’s shuffled off to a secret apartment. Then the wait, then an endless train ride, third class; then a bus, then this._ ) 

The ropes of the suspension bridge dance, and dance, and dance.

His new house is quite old. It’s tucked away from the road, right next to the forest, sticking out of tall grasses with a bunch of outhouses – a toilet, a woodshed, a chicken coop, who the hell knows – like weird overgrown mushrooms. It takes some fumbling before he manages to open the door with the keys he was given, and then the house opens its maw and breathes out the damp air of a place long abandoned right into his face. After a moment’s hesitation, he decides against kicking off his shoes, and walks in.

Throughout his journey here, he tried very carefully not to imagine his new circumstances, and he still is disappointed. There’s a bed with a sagging metal frame, a dining table covered with fading cellophane, a small gas stove and a red gas tank (he turns the vent and takes a sniff: there’s still some gas left; _don’t think, don’t think_ ). In the corner, there’s a huge oven, hunched like an animal that crawled into a hole to die, all broken angles and ribs sticking out. On the wall, a tear-off calendar with anecdotes and agricultural advice, torn open on March 2, 1987: probably marking the date of death of the house’s previous inhabitant. That’s it for printed materials: so much for spiritual nourishment. He wonders, briefly, who got to inherit his well-loved library; grieves his neat selection of books with a pain that’s almost physical. Well, there’s no going back now, so he might as well get on with his new life. 

His knowledge of what village life might entail is largely academic: vaguely remembered Tolstoy rather than vacations with the grandparents. Well, since he got a stove, he might as well use it, unless he wants to freeze to death after all this trouble, he thinks, and gets down to business. After some undignified shuffling on his knees, he finds kindling under the stove and tries to make a fire. The hinges of the oven’s door are almost rusted shut, and when he finally manages to pry them open, the first several matches die ineffectually, the flames barely licking the kindling.

It’s only after he shreds several days’ worth of the calendar, making the time frozen still in this desolate place move again, and throws it on top of the kindling, that the fire takes. He shakes his fists victoriously (Boris’s gesture, he remembers with a pang of regret), but before he has time to get on with unpacking his meager possessions, the house begins to fill with bitter smoke.

Some smoke, Valera supposes, must be expected under the circumstances, but not whole acrid clouds of the stuff. The stove belches smoke as if it was taking meticulous revenge for all the fires they have managed to put out in Chernobyl. He casts about, but there’s no water he could throw on the fire; besides, soaking the stove he’ll rely on for warmth doesn’t seem like a smart idea. He clangs the stove’s door shut, but smoke keeps pouring out through the cracks. He doubles over in a cough, his eyes begin to tear: with the lack of oxygen, with the smoke, with anger at the futility of it all. Sand, he thinks; if the damn fire doesn’t die in the next couple of minutes, he’ll have to throw sand at it, history repeating itself as a farce. 

He gets up, leaning heavily on his knees, and stumbles, still coughing, towards the door, where he almost knocks into a man with an axe slung casually over his shoulder, and his chest defiantly bare despite the autumn chill.

“Who the fuck are you?” says the man, baring a mouthful of golden teeth.

To survive Chernobyl, fake his own death and hide in a village deep in the Carpathians, too small to feature on any but the most detailed maps, only to be felled by an axe-wielding maniac, seems a fittingly absurd coda to his altogether absurd life, but Valera still raises his hands in an appeasing gesture. 

“I live here now.”

“Yeah?” the man drawls, spitting through a hole where his front teeth once were. “You a relative of Old Pavlykha?”

“No, you could say I was given this as a reward.”

“Some reward,” the man says, and kicks at a wooden fence around what once was a flowerbed, which groans and leans perilously to the side.

“Befits what I did,” Valera says with a shrug.

“What, you killed somebody?”

He did, if not in the way the man might think of, so Valera just shrugs again, and gestures towards the door. “I think the stove is broken.”

In agreement, tendrils of smoke start seeping out of the door, coiling towards his feet.

"No shit,” the man nods sagely. “I thought you were trying to burn the house down. Have you removed the chimney damper?"

Valera might have, if he knew what a chimney damper was. He invites the man in with a gesture, and the man carefully removes his muddy rubber boots before walking in. 

“Do people often break into houses and burn them down around here?” Valera asks, watching the man remove a thin steel plate that blocked the chimney, and start fanning the dying flames.

“Not recently, no,” the man says, finally closing the stove’s door. “The store’s closed today. Got food?”

“Some.”

“Don’t go anywhere.”

This is the end of the earth, or as good as; where else could he go? Before Valera’s done walking around the garden, trying to guess which trees are dead, and which have merely shed their foliage for the winter, the man comes back with a quarter loaf of rye bread, three large onions, a bottle of vodka, and a sack. The sack moves and squirms in his arms.

Valera laughs nervously. “A pig in a poke?”

"It’s a hen,” the man says, tipping the sack over to reveal a disgruntled red hen. “For eggs."

Valera doesn't have the first idea how much a live hen might cost, but when he reaches for his wallet, the man merely shakes his head.

“Let’s drink to our meeting.”

The man unceremoniously rifles through kitchen cabinets, wiping the objects he finds on his trousers, which is unlikely to make them any cleaner. After the vodka is poured and the onions are cut into thin slices, they fall silent, the odd visitor proving himself a man of few teeth and even fewer words.

“I’m sorry,” Valera says, wiping away tears, “it’s the onions.”

They clink their glasses. Then again, and again, biting into onion sandwiches after each shot.

The man sniffs at the last hints of smoke in the air. “You’ll need firewood. Lemme see what I can do. If you need anything, ask for Vasyl. Vasyl- that’s me. Every last dog knows me here, I’m the district policeman. Captain Kobylchuk at your service. May I take a look at your passport, now that I’m here, so that I won’t have to walk up here twice?”

Valera almost laughs with relief. Suddenly everything makes sense. Was the policeman notified of the true identity of the new resident? Or was he just told that a poorly liquidator was granted this plot of land, and was now trying to suss out the details on his own? He reaches into the inner pocket of his coat, and slides the new passport, with the last name he’ll probably never think of as his own, across the table.

"We are all friends here, don’t you worry,” the policeman says, leafing through the passport. “It gets dark here, gotta look out for your neighbour."

Spy on the neighbor might be a more fitting description, Valera thinks, but doesn’t say. Instead he drinks, not with the intensity he did when in Chernobyl, courting unconsciousness and relying on Boris to get him to his room by the end of the night, but with something much closer to boredom. His life is already over and done with, and there’s not much else he can do to fill these stretches of time that hold no meaning.

It’s long past dark when Captain Kobylchuk finally leaves. Swaying on his feet, Valera gets to the bed and sinks into it without undressing, and lets out an involuntary yelp of surprise. The bed’s metal springs sag almost to the floor like a hammock, and creak whenever he makes the smallest movement. Before long, he realizes that, no matter how drunk he might be, sleep will not come.

The house is pitch-dark, with not a hint of light anywhere, and smells of damp earth. Whenever his consciousness starts to drift, he’s brought back by the deafening absence of sounds, and by the smell of a fresh grave. It befits his status as a man freshly dead, but he cannot stand it. Suffocating, he scrambles outside, and freezes still on the doorstep.

The entire sky is shining with stars. There is so little light pollution in this tiny village up in the mountains that familiar constellations are blurred with a fine sprinkling of stars less familiar, weird and distant, invisible to naked eye under normal circumstances. Mist is seeping from the woods towards the house, soft and painfully white in the light of faraway galaxies, the surreal wave of earthly milk ready to sweep him up. In the distance, the river sighs in its sleep. Nothing in the landscape betrays the presence of human beings, and it would lose not a whiff of its beauty if humankind disappeared altogether.

He remembers watching the air shine with radiation, and wishes Boris could see this instead.

He hugs his shoulders against the cold, and only then notices that the familiar pain in his bones has subsided. On the way back into the house, he steps into his hen’s shit, and swears.

He switches on the light and gives the bed a once-over. There’s no way he will fall asleep in this poky, creaky metal hammock. Resigned, he drags the flat mattress onto the ledge on top of the stove, and, huddled against its warm clay back, sleeps better than he’s slept in two years.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a dreadful slog, this entire business of being dead, Valera discovers on his very first morning in his new home. He wakes up restless, tries to pull up a pail of water from the well to wash up, spills half of it, his untrained hands slipping with the unfamiliar weight. Not daring to tinker with the gas first thing in the morning ( _don’t think, don’t think_ ), he splashes cold water at his armpits and crotch, grunting with the chill, then peels one of the leftover hardboiled eggs for breakfast, and eats it as slowly as he can to stave off idleness. He trained himself since his university years to manage time well, so that he would have time enough for everything he needed (early morning hours in the library, when the windows were still weepy with frost, then classes, followed by afternoon hours in the laboratory, then a couple hours of reading or grading exams, tea with evening news, then sleep), and none to spare to think about the things he didn’t need to think about. Then came Chernobyl, and time, a well-allotted, well-managed resource, began to run out. They managed to avert the worst in the nick of time, and then he was living on borrowed time, and then, this unfamiliar surplus of time, time in suffocating excess. There was nothing sane about Chernobyl, so they had to keep sane to set right the time that was out of joint; this abundance of time, with nothing to fill it, might drive him mad yet. The prospect of endless days instills nothing but a sense of ill-formed dread.

He wonders idly, as has become his habit, how Boris is coping with it all. He’s been keeping track of him as best he could, looking at delegations in newsreels, buying newspapers but never saving any issues: wouldn’t want to give them another hook (well, never, except for that one issue with an entire spread on nuclear energy, and a postmark-sized photo of Boris in a miraculously unrelated article: he kept it open on the nuclear energy article, to obviate all questions). There’s no telling from blurry photos if Boris is still losing weight; if he has lost sleep yet; what he dreams of if he hasn’t. When the plan to hide Valera out in the neck of the woods was first forged, Valera honestly thought of it as a fresh start, and entertained the idea of forgoing newspapers altogether, except maybe for a local publication with updates about crops, competitions between collective farms, and weather forecasts. But then he realized that Shcherbina was no longer big enough to ensure that the news of his passing would merit notes in provincial newspapers, and thought better of his plan.

Between travelling and settling in in his new home, he hasn’t read the news in a couple of days- more than a week, he realizes, and the thought makes anxiety curl in his throat. He has no reason to believe anything has happened in this couple of days ( _anything_ : that’s how he thinks of it, clinging to the cowardly indeterminacy of the word), but then, events unfold regardless of his knowledge, and his knowledge or lack thereof makes the situation no better or worse. The thought of keeping dead Boris in his thoughts for company as if he was still alive feels mildly repulsive though, like touching a corpse.

He’ll take the bus out to a larger town, a district center, he decides. Stock up on food, get the week’s backlog of the press, maybe try to find a better winter coat. It’s a good excuse anyway, even if there’s a nagging realization that if he ever boards a bus out, there’ll be no telling if he’ll have it in him to come back. He could just keep going from one village to the next, a frail old man, until he runs out of money or his immune system can no longer cope with chills and drafts, and then- To avoid temptation (to avoid suspicion, a voice in his head whispers), he doesn’t even pack his briefcase before retracing his steps to the central square. He sits down at the bus stop and begins to wait, and then continues to wait, and then waits some more because he has nothing better to do.

An old lady, leaning heavily on a stick, wanders out from the hut across the street from him and eyes him with interest.

“The bus has just left,” she says. “Good afternoon.”

“I’ve been here for an hour,” he blurts out before realizing that he doesn’t quite know what constitutes “just left” in this place where nothing happens to punctuate the passage of time.

The woman shrugs. “You know how buses are.”

That makes them sound like beings with a malicious will, but then, maybe they are, if you wait at the freezing bus stop for long enough. Well, one day doesn’t change anything, he thinks, and is about ready to head back to his house when his gaze falls on the familiar shell shape of a pay phone.

He’s been on his best behavior these past months (he’s been on his best behavior his whole life, he amends, first a teacher’s pet, then a favorite of all the aging matronly lab technicians; always, if not for several smaller lapses nobody needed to know about, and for one big lapse that meant nothing else needed to be known about him). After the conversation with Charkov, he never once tried to call Boris. A call from this village will be as much of a giveaway as calling from his own apartment, but he needs to know that Boris is safe. There’s no such thing as “safe” for them, his inner voice ruthlessly amends, not since that helicopter landed in Chernobyl. Well then, he needs to hear his voice, a brief “Shcherbina,” followed by an irritated “Hello” into the silence on the line, then long beeps.

He flips open his wallet, but he has no coins left; he remembers sweeping them all out last morning to buy a glass of lemonade. He rifles through his coat and jacket pockets, first calmly, then frantically, then double-checks, trying to keep calm. For want of a nail- he’s not an angry man by nature, it takes something much grander to provoke his ire, but he’s choking on rage now. He rifles through his pockets again and again, then kicks at the wall; sharp pain makes him instantly regret that decision. It turns out to be a blessing in disguise though, for when he leans down to rub at the toe of his shoe, he sees a glinting 5-kopek coin in wilting grass. His hands shake so badly that he drops it twice before it finally slides with a satisfying clang into the slot.

The payphone beeps, but the moment he dials the Moscow city code, the line goes dead.

There’s a rustling of bike tires, and Vasyl the Unlikely Police Captain rides up to him.

“Local connection only,” he says with something approximating sympathy. “You’ll have to get to the post office to call Moscow.”

“When the bus comes, you mean?”

“Well, you wouldn’t want us all to go calling the Kremlin?” Vasyl laughs as if the joke was genuinely funny, then sniffs at the air like a hunting dog. “Oh, I brought you some firewood, so you’d better go back and carry it inside. There’ll be snow tomorrow.” 

The sky is light blue, with barely a cloud in sight, so Valera doesn’t quite believe his forecast, but there’s indeed a modest mountain of firewood piled in the center of his courtyard, and a bottle of vodka, no more than a third full, propped against it. He spends the rest of the day carrying it to the woodshed, remembering that he should be tired only when he’s almost done.

Good thing he listened through, because the weather does indeed turn the next day. It starts as a light drizzle but turns into wet snow, making him clutch desperately at the handholds of the suspension bridge as he trudges out to the bus stop again.

His hands are frozen solid by the time he reaches the bus stop, so he tucks them under his armpits as he hides as best he can under the concrete overhang and prepares to wait.

"Maybe it's not coming,” says the young woman passing the stop. “Good afternoon.”

"Does that happen often?" he asks, irritated with how his teeth chatter with the cold.

"Only during the flood season." 

He looks at the puddles turning to icy slush under his feet. "And how long does that last?"

"It's always flood season," says the woman, and after a moment's pause, adds, "unless it's snow season. We’ve got everything you need here."

“Can I get a winter coat here?”

She shrugs, not deigning to acknowledge this place’s deficiency.

Later that evening, there’s a rattling knock on his door. He thought he had nothing left to fear, but being aware of his body’s limitations has made him scare easily, despite his best judgment. He’s not yet used to the sounds of the house – the crackling and sighing of the stove, the windows rattling slightly in the wind, a small apple tree scratching at the frames – but the knock is too insistent to be natural. He shudders involuntarily and walks cautiously to the door. It’s Vasyl again, the familiar axe slung over one shoulder again, and something that looks large and vaguely alive, or recently alive, held in the other hand. Without preamble, he throws the thing at Valera, and he ducks on instinct. Vasyl chuckles.

“Halka said you needed a coat. Here, it’s as good as new.”

Cautiously, Valera picks the thing up. It looks like an entire squadron had fought its way to Berlin and back in it, one man at a time, possibly several times over. It’s warm though, he discovers after putting it on, and the size is just about right.

He puts it to a test the very next morning when he tries to go mushroom-picking in the mountains, walking straight into the forest up from his yard. Before long, his feet sink 20 centimeters into wet cold moss before hitting frozen earth underneath; he slides and rolls, almost breaks his foot when it slides under a rotten log, slashes his palm on a dry stick. When he licks the blood off, his skin tastes of wood, pine, ancient subterranean things calmly waiting. It’s too late in the season for mushrooms anyway.

He loses track of time after that. Time flies the way it does when there’s nothing to fill it with, aimlessly and with little to show for it. He meets the local nurse (no doctors in this tiny speck on the map). He finds a local library, well-stocked with volumes of Lenin, but not much else. (“Jules Verne? Jack London?” “You’ll get enough snow right here soon enough.”) He gets into the habit of queuing in front of the store an hour before it opens if he wants to get any food (the village, which looks like a handful of houses strewn across several mountains, seems to double, if not triple in size whenever the groceries are brought in, judging by the length of the queue). He grows a beard, then shaves it off, then grows it out again. Little by little, he realizes with the sense of pride he’s almost ashamed of, he’s begun to be viewed as local: a local curiosity rather than a full-fledged local resident, but a local nonetheless. 

After he has spent fifty minutes queuing under sharp angry snow that sweeps over the ground almost horizontally, a man exiting the shop with a string bag of groceries and a baby in his arms eyes Valera with pity.

"They’ve got hake, but they only sell a kilo per person. Here, take her," the man explains, and a moment later, before Valera has a chance to answer, he gets a handful of a squirming baby. "Now you’ll get two kilos."

Valera looks at the baby in horror. "I've been to Chernobyl."

"You are okay," the man says in a voice that betrays more cheerful confidence than actual medical knowledge. "Besides, who knows what would have become of this place if that wasn’t contained."

The baby is moist and smells of piss and boiled cabbage. Valera tries very hard not to cry. The baby’s small, so horrifyingly small, born after that happened, in the time they borrowed with their own lives as the guarantee. Armageddon happened, and then life went on.

"The saleswoman will know she's not mine," Valera says through a cough in a last-ditch attempt to get the baby out of his arms. 

"It's okay, we all do that,” says the woman before him in the line. “Two kilo’s two kilo."

“Where’s your wife?” he asks the man to while away the time, tapping his feet for warmth. The baby gurgles happily with the movement.

“Oh, she’s not here yet.”

“The buses,” Valera says fatalistically.

“Yeah, the buses.”

When he gets to the head of the line, the saleswoman greets the baby by name, but doesn’t hesitate to sell him 2 kilos of frozen hake, hard and watery like slivers of ice.

She’s so busy talking to the baby that when she says, "I’ve set aside some chocolate butter for you," Valera almost assumes it’s meant for the infant.

“What will I do with all these riches?”

“You never know. The holidays are coming.”

The holidays have always meant little for him; they mean less than ever now. He’s always been alone, if not necessarily lonely. There were large parties during his student years, growing ever smaller as most everyone got paired off or was assigned to distant corners of the USSR, then Chernobyl with its frantic bustle of men eager for a chance, any chance to celebrate (the first Tuesday of the week, and we ain’t dead yet), and then his world shrunk even more. And besides, these are odd winter holidays that don’t quite align with anything he has experienced, men in weird masks going along mountaintops and singing to dead houses. 

The sliver of chocolate butter, wrapped in brown paper, is so thin it's almost translucent, and the butter's going rancid, but he knows to treasure it. He smears half of it on bread and eats slowly, listening as the snow scratches at the windows.

It’s almost dark when he thinks he hears a car drive past. A sound he hasn’t heard in a long time, followed by nothing. He would have forgotten about it, if not for the oddness of the tires rustling in this quiet evening. Pulling on his coat, he walks to the door and glances outside.

There’s a shadow down by the road: a tall man in a black coat, a dark patch against the encroaching snow-clad night, something oddly indecisive about his pose. In the soft dusk light, the snow obscuring shadows and brittle edges, Shcherbina looks younger than he remembers him, possibly younger even than he ever knew him. The snow's falling so heavily now that it has already covered the car tracks. He closes his eyes, opens them again to make sure that the unbelievable, impossible, unspeakable apparition doesn’t disappear.

"Well, do come in."


	3. Chapter 3

He’s too slow to move out of the doorway, too clumsy, surprise grounding him in place, so Boris has to brush past him to come in. He smells of gasoline and winter, the odd, distant, impersonal smell. Against himself, he’s almost tempted to lean in and sniff out the smell of the man, his afternoon sweat, his tension, his aftershave. There’s so much to be said that he cannot say anything at all.

While he turns to bolt the door, Boris, uninvited but driven by a long habit of someone in charge of providing supplies and support, conducts an inspection of the house. He opens the bulky fridge, which lets out a growling whine, rattles the doors of the cupboards, snorts, checks the room, frowns at the naked bedsprings, nods approvingly at the stove, looks into the nook under the stove to check for kindling and declares it “sufficient, I guess,” then sticks his head into the diminutive pantry, still empty.

“Is it really the best you could have come up with?” He says, sneezing from the dust raised by all the rattling of doors.

"The toilet's outdoors, if that’s what you are looking for," Valera says, unexpectedly offended. He was growing rather proud of how he’s been arranging his life here.

Boris finally stops and gives him a once-over. There’s a genuine smile when he pats him on the back, so firm that Valera’s knees buckle a little.

"Village life suits you."

It isn’t until then that Valera notices that Boris hasn’t coughed once since he came into the house. His suit fits him better too, no longer making him look like a skeleton hastily wrapped in a sack.

"You don't look bad either. You might still beat the odds of that 5-year prognosis. Hell, we both might." The vulnerable look in Boris’s eyes makes him instantly regret saying it. He doesn’t see providing an honest expert opinion as cruelty, so he never really regretted blurting out that prognosis, even if the wording could have been better, whereas this casual permission to hope just might be described as impermissible. “Come on, I’ll go make us some tea.”

In their previous life, in Chernobyl, then in Vienna, then in Moscow, while they would still meet on occasion, Boris was usually the one to fill the silences with matter-of-fact, impeccably pragmatic questions and observations. Now he just looks and looks, a fish out of the water.

“How did you get here?” Valera asks, taking up the unfamiliar role.

Boris hesitates, then barks out a gruff laugh: his we-are-all-in-the-same-boat laugh, his I’m-your-man laugh that has put many, from the highest party officials to construction workers, at ease. Valera sees the bare brittle bones underneath. “I have a very good driver. Swears up and down he was a stunt driver in that movie, you know, the one about Italians-”

Valera knows these carefully orchestrated stories can spin and stretch, so he interrupts, “How did they let you?”

“There are ways,” Boris says after a pause, then falls silent, mixing sugar in an old cup with several chinks in the rim. He drinks his tea scalding hot, without taking the teaspoon out of the cup.

Valera would trust Boris with his life, had trusted him with his life. For a while, Boris _was_ his life, the only vibrant, raging, furious, busy presence against the desolate landscape, holding hell at bay with makeshift solutions, and tons of sand, and thousands of workers thrown in to dam the inferno. They’ve been through war together, but war, or at least their war, was over. What did they have left, in the absence of that?

“Well, how have you been?” Valera asks, not ready to give up just yet.

Boris sighs. “Busy. Making busy. I wanted to make a mark, you know, as if that changed anything.”

Valera reaches out to touch his hand, then snatches his hand back as if scalded. Of the two of them, he has never been the one for grand pronouncements, but he’ll have to be, just this once. Not daring to look up, he says, hoping that it will suffice,

“Whether they know it or not, whether you think much about it or not, there are people alive today who would be dead if not for what you did, and-”

“What _we_ did,” Boris barks, interrupting him. “And what’s that to me? What’s that to you? I’ve been coughing out my lungs, and listening to my heart at night like an old man. When I was young, I thought I’d rather be dead than be that old man, and then, when you reach that age- Anyway, and you are here.”

“I like it here,” Valera says, realizing as the words come out that they are not necessarily untrue. He likes parts of it anyway: how the woods breathe milky smoke in the morning; how the sky leans ever lower over the ground as the season progresses, like a branch bent to the ground with accumulated snow; the small, miserly kindnesses of the people he’d met here.

“I bet you do,” Boris says with an unkind, barking laugh, “for this was the best case scenario. There was a plan to get you on sodomy charges, you know. I vetoed it." When Valera stays silent, he adds, "I said good workers don't know about that sort of thing, and we sure as hell don't want to give them ideas."

Valera puts on another kettle of water to boil, and, not turning to look at Boris, says with the levity that sounds fake even to himself, “I can assure you workers find a way.”

Another barking laugh. “I know. I just didn’t want your dirty laundry to be aired in the public eye, alright? And I knew you wouldn’t survive two years in the camps, not with your health. Me looking like an old prude was a small price to pay for that.”

Valera doesn't turn to face him; doesn't move at all. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands; doesn’t know what an innocent would say in this situation. Probably make a lurid joke about those fags, he assumes, but he’s suddenly too tired.

“Stop hovering, why don’t you? Do sit down,” Boris says, steel in his tone, then slides his cup of tea closer to Valera. “Drink, I still have some tea left.”

Valera automatically picks up the cup, his lips touching the rim Boris’s lips touched not a moment earlier, then clears his throat. "The charges would have been true though."

Boris lets out a long, throaty laugh, then slaps him on the knee in a universal gesture of camaraderie.

"Oh, I know. It was in your dossier, in case I ever needed to reign you in."

Shame mixed relief floods his mind. He’s been hiding so long when he needn’t have, because it was out in the open before he knew the game has begun. So that was why Boris despised him from their first meeting. That was why it took him so long to see Valera as competent and worth trusting.

"One of your paramours was a KGB informer. It made sense, really, to have something on you just in case, you being in nuclear energy and having a profile that suggested you might be open to approaches from the West."

“Who?” Valera asks automatically, then takes off his glasses and rubs at his eyes. “Wait, it doesn’t matter.”

“I gave him hell after you died. He’ll never work again. Not in the sciences, not in the libraries, not anywhere.”

“You shouldn’t have,” he says, and then goes cold at the implication. So they didn’t tell Boris that they were faking his death. How long before he found out? How angry was he at Valera? He’s been so busy imagining outliving Boris that the opposite thought never even occurred. 

“It felt good.” Boris says with an honest smile of a large predator. “It was what you’d describe as-“

And then there’s a knock on the door. 

“Is that your driver?” Valera asks, getting up. He’d have given anything to put several hundreds of kilometers between them a couple of minutes ago, and suddenly he’s unwilling to let Boris go so soon.

“I don’t think he’ll come back today, not in this weather.”

The knocking intensifies, and when Valera unbolts the door, he’s met with a gust of snow-laced wind and the sight of Vasyl, the familiar axe in hand.

“Your hen is running around,” the policeman says.

“I’ve locked the chicken coop.”

“Yeah, and I saw her out in the garden. You’d better catch her before she catches her death.”

Valera pulls on the coat and, apologizing to Boris, walks out into the blizzard. He doesn’t fancy running around after the springy little thing in this weather, that’s for sure. When he reaches the chicken coop though, it is safely bolted. 

“What the-” He turns around to face Vasyl, whose face is more serious than he’s ever seen it.

"Some friends you have."

Official police business then. Comings and goings, stealthy reports on suspicious activity.

“He’s a good friend,” Valera says. “He just came to visit me on his way-”

“On his way to where? There’s nothing past here. Valera-Valera, good men don’t come at night, not in this weather, not in a black Volga.”

Valera quickly glances back at the house. Following his gaze, Vasyl leans in closer.

"Don’t worry, he can’t hear us, not in this weather. I can barely hear myself fart when it snows like this. If he’s giving you trouble, say a word, yeah? Remember when KGB agents used to disappear quite a lot in these parts?"

Valera recoils.

“Oh don’t worry,” Vasyl says, trying to light up a cigarette rolled from a newspaper. The matches go out in the snow one after the other. “The roads are bad here. People unfamiliar with the woods sometimes get lost.”

Valera can barely believe his ears. "Aren't you the one supposed to uphold order here?"

Vasyl spits. "The Soviet order is far, and we are here. We look after our own."

“Well, I’m looking after myself just fine.”

“You sure are,” Vasyl says, heading for the garden gate. “But remember, you don’t have to go at it alone.”

His figure is almost instantly swallowed up by the swirling snow. When Valera looks up, bewildered by the conversation, it seems for a moment like the entire sky is crumbling and falling. Was Vasyl testing him? But then, who’d be stupid enough to even take that bait?

“I guess your driver isn’t coming,” he says, knocking the snow off his boots after he returns to the house. “Not in this weather, and it’s getting late. You can sleep on the stove, I guess.”

He dumps his coat, the snow-wet side down, on the bare bead. It can serve as an adequate, if not a comfortable mattress for the night, he decides.

“What, and leave you in that dump?” Boris asks.

“Take the stove. I insist.”

“We’ll both fit.” 

They will, but it’s not necessarily a good idea. “It won’t be comfortable.”

“I’ve slept in a snowed-in trench. I’ll manage.”

There doesn’t seem to be much point arguing, but Valera soon discovers that, while Boris might manage, he himself doesn’t find the situation to his taste. He has seldom had opportunities to sleep with anybody, even platonically—especially platonically—and the oddness of it chases sleep away. Drifting in and out of shallow fleeting sleep, he is painfully aware of the body lying next to his, warm and breathing, taking up space, demanding acknowledgement of its presence, unaware of death already curled inside it. Boris turns several times on the mattress, like a dog preparing a nest, and seems to wink out instantly, but whenever Valera manages to slip deeper into a doze, a minute movement or sound of the body next to his sparks anxious awe in him, a reminder of life going on against all odds. 

“Are you asleep.” Shcherbina suddenly says, a command rather than a question. Not so fast asleep himself then, Valera thinks and almost laughs, turning towards him. "I missed you."

He doesn’t know what to say to that, but there’s no need to say anything, for Boris continues, “I almost missed Chernobyl. What we did mattered. Didn’t it?”

“It did.” He almost reaches out, almost touches him, not that “almost” ever counted for much. Unaccustomed to nighttime rituals, he says, “Sweet dreams.”

Boris chuckles, but falls quiet after that, and soon sleep finally sweeps up Valera too.

Judging by the murky pre-dawn light seeping through the windows when he wakes up, he has slept through most of the night, and if the wet quality of the light is anything to go by, the snow hasn’t subsided. It’s not the light that wakes him up though, but a touch.

Boris, it turns out, is as unafraid to claim space in sleep as he is when he’s awake, and one outstretched foot is planted firmly against Valera’s ankle. It’s the mundanity of this unceremonious foot that dismays Valera; he never envied other people grand gestures, loud weddings, cars decorated with balloons, till-death-do-us-part and all that, but the small things that might pass unremarked, like being woken up by someone kicking in his sleep, awakens long-stifled longings in him. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he’d never get angry with the man who hogged his blanket, if he had a man to share a blanket with, for he freezes easily, what with his health and age and all, but it’s what he would tell that man in the moment, for sure. Irony doesn’t help the pressing matter though, this longing having awakened in him desires much more earthly in nature. The seam of his pajama bottoms is digging painfully into his hard cock.

Surreptitiously, so as not to wake up Boris, he reaches into his pajama pants to adjust his cock, trying to keep his breathing as slow and even as possible. Once his grip closes over the cock though, the temptation proves too much. He doesn’t dare move, but if he rubs his thumb over the tip a couple of times, who’s to know? The touch of his left hand feels awkward, as if it were another man, not yet knowing what he likes, but eager to learn. His eyes drift shut as he hungrily breathes in the air that smells of Boris. He rubs over the slit, pulling back the foreskin, and hisses through gritted teeth; imagines being pinned in this nook, imagines another man’s grip growing stronger, squeezes, waits for the tremble to pass, breathes out with his mouth open, rubs again. He won’t bring the act to completion, he thinks desperately, but it feels so good, this quiet moment, unheard, unseen-

When he opens his eyes, Boris is watching him with naked curiosity. His hand in his pants freezes.

“Um-”

He wonders what the protocol might be for being caught with his hand down his pants, rubbing one out next to his only friend. Should he apologize? Should he wipe his palm on his shirt (but then, wouldn’t that imply that things have proceeded rather farther than they have, but if so, does this difference matter)?

“Don’t mind me,” Boris rasps.

He should definitely apologize, Valera decides. Apologizes don’t solve anything, but they cannot hurt either. “I’m so-”

“Oh, Valerka,” Boris says, and there’s so much longing in his voice that Valera cannot help but laugh. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who has spent these years missing the other like a broken tooth. Maybe they can still have their could-have-beens. With a flurry of movement, Boris is on top of him, a forceful bony weight; he spreads his legs, making room for him, then yelps when the bone of Boris’s thigh digs into his erection, then laughs when he realizes that Boris is just as hard. It’s with that laugh that he reaches to cup the back of Boris’s head, and pulls him into a kiss.

Boris isn’t a good kisser, it turns out, too forceful, too greedy, wanting everything at once, now, or better yet, yesterday, the way he demanded tons of sand and all the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union, his stubble scratches, their noses bump, teeth clack at an awkward angle, “Ow,” he says, his hand flying to his lips, but Boris bats his palm away and covers Valera’s lips with his own again.

Boris’s hips rut against his in a broken rhythm, rapid but uneven, trying to slot their cocks together through two layers of pants; he arches up to meet his thrusts as best he can, spreads his legs wider for a better angle.

“Yes,” he says, “yes,” when Boris dives down to bite at the line of his chin. “Wait, it’d be better if we-” He shimmies, and Boris takes the cue, helping him to pull the pants down, than, fumblingly, pushing his underpants halfway down his thighs.

They slot back together, their cocks kissing. “I need-” The pleasure is slow, inefficient, impossible; Boris thrusts, angling their cocks closer together, and an ache spreads on the inside of his thighs. “I want-” One hand tangled in Boris’s hair, Valera reaches his free hand down to cup his ass.

He arches up, answering him thrust for thrust, kiss for kiss, angry bite for an angry bite. When his hand strays between Boris’s buttocks, and rubs, and circles, Boris tenses for a moment, and then pushes down again, his hand working their cocks furiously, squeezing them together so intently that it’s hard to tell where pain ends and pleasure begins. This is what they could have had, Valera thinks with the small part of his mind that is still capable of thought; and how in the hell is he supposed to do without afterwards? He hooks his knee behind Boris’s back, pulling him closer, and his thrusts grow faster. Boris whimpers when Valera untangles his hand from his hair and licks his palm, then covers Boris’s fingers on their cocks, mussing against the tips and driving him to a faster rhythm. The angle’s awkward and his wrist will complain come morning, but his hips already twitch sharply upwards into the touch. He buckles when he comes, almost pushing Boris off him; Boris looks at him with wonder, laughter dancing in his darkened eyes, as he finally brings himself off with the last few tugs.

Boris rolls off him, but his hand, still sticky with their come, instantly sneaks back to squeeze his, as if holding him in place in the stormy seas. Valera squeezes back, listens as their breathing slowly calms down.

"It was such a waste,” Boris says after a while. “This brain of yours, this heart. Such a bloody damned waste."

"Then summon me back. I'm right here." Silence. Valera knows he’s pushed it too far, so he rolls on the side and bumps Boris on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, this is a not a honeypot to make you put in a good word for me with Charkov.”

The anger on Boris’s face makes him recoil. “Drop it, alright? I’ve had enough of this charade.”

Valera raises his hands. “I don’t understand.”

"You are the most ruthlessly honest man I know. You told Gorbachev that the reactor was gone before anybody suspected it. You told me we’d be dead within five years before the party thought of evacuating the city. You never lie, not to spare anyone’s feelings. This act of yours has outstayed it’s welcome.” 

“What act?”

Boris raises himself up on the shoulder, squinting at Valera across inches of dim light.

“Fuck, you honestly don’t understand?”

“Don’t understand what? I’ve been out of the loop with the news. We don’t really get current newspapers here.”

Boris pulls him into a hug and squeezes so badly it hurts, covering his head with his palm, as if trying to protect him. Valera feels through the vibrations of his chest rather than hears a raspy laugh that breaks off with a cough, and then,

“That's rather the point. You are dead, Valera. So, for that matter, am I."


	4. Chapter 4

He recoils, or tries to, but Boris holds him in place, pressed against his solid, sweating, living body. He thrashes like a fish in a net, then goes quiet, breathing in the air Boris breathes out. He can hear his heart beat slow and steady, not the heart of a dying man, not the heart of someone whom doctors gave only a year to live.

Finally he says, breathing against the crook of his wrist, “Don’t talk shit, Boria. I’m here because it was decided that it would be better if-”

Boris doesn’t let him finish. “And where exactly is ‘here,’ in your expert opinion?”

“The Ukrainian SSR, Ivano-Frankivsk Region, Verkhovyna District-”

“And you’ve been here for how long?”

He tries to remember, he honestly does, but he stopped keeping track of time sometime soon after his arrival. Even the old calendar has long been used up for stoking fire. “A couple of months?”

“Two years, Valera. That’s how long you’ve been dead, so your five-year plan was all shit.” Boris finally lets him go and sits up. “Wouldn’t peg you for an optimist, but I missed the mark by a whole year.”

That’s why they’ve let Boris go, Valera realizes, going cold. That’s why they’ve let Boris join him.

“Cognitive impairment is a sign of radiation sickness. That, and depression,” he says cautiously. Boris is mad, and once he has outlived his usefulness, he was sent off to live out his life here, in a place with no adequate medical facilities, like those disfigured World War II veterans who couldn’t find a place in society and were shipped off to the islands in the north. They’ll manage, he thinks decisively, they have always managed under impossible circumstances, what’s this if not one more challenge, nothing new, he’ll be fine, even if the memories of his grandmother, sliding into comfortable fog without memories in her last years, fills him with foreboding and old worn grief.

"Fuck cognitive impairment,” Boris snarls. “Did anybody die here during your stay? Is there a cemetery here? Is there a connection to the outside world? Did you ever manage to get farther than a couple kilometers away from the village?"

Between the odd bus schedule and his failed mushroom-gathering excursion into the woods, it’s not even a couple of kilometers, but Boris doesn’t need to hear that right now.

"The bus connection is intermittent,” he says. “I'll write to the District Committee."

“You do that. But for now, walk with me.”

They get dressed together comfortably, Boris handing him a stray sock that fell behind a chair, Valera lending him the old coat that fits Boris so much better than it ever fit him. In the early morning quiet of the chilly house, he can almost forget about what’s to come.

They walk towards the closest outskirts of the village, and before long, houses give way to tall snow-covered trees, hovering along the road like hungry sentinels.

“See,” Valera says when the houses disappear from view.

“We are barely two hundred meters away from the village,” Boris says. “You wait and see.”

Walking in deep snow along the road that hasn’t seen renovations in the better part of a decade isn’t comfortable. Valera’s shoes are soon wet, and he twists an ankle in a pothole. He wants to head back, have a cup of tea, feed the hen, fry the hake, but he’s got to show Boris.

The road takes a sharp turn, and they find themselves facing several big spruces fallen across the road.

“See,” Boris says.

Oh God, he thinks. So this is how it’s going to be. Keeping up the cheerful façade, he says, “It’s just trees. Trees do fall, you know, especially in winter.”

It takes some effort to climb over the trunks, but they manage, giving each other a hand, pulling and pushing up, Valera almost falls, sliding to the ground like a sack of potatoes, but Boris holds him upright. By the end of the ridiculous enterprise, they are both laughing, cheeks flushed red with the effort. Valera takes a surreptitious glance up and down the road, and, giddy with his newfound courage, reaches out and takes Boris’s hand. For a second, Boris tenses, but then clasps his fingers, strong, decisive, warm, alive.

Their trip ends after the very next swerve in the road. A mudslide took out an entire stretch of asphalt, leaving nothing but a steep slope with mangled tree roots and small stones.

“See,” Boris repeats triumphantly, and then lifts Valera’s hand to press his wrist to his lips. His breath is warm against Valera’s skin, and makes his pulse speed up. 

“It’s just a minor flood,” Valera says. “It’s always flood season here.” After a second’s hesitation, he adds, “Unless it’s snow season.” He doesn’t remember a storm that would have resulted in this sort of a mudslide, but then, sometimes he barely leaves the house for days.

They turn back and start walking towards the village.

“We took a turn onto a wrong road,” Valera says after the second turn. “The fallen trees are gone, we should backtrack.”

Boris lets out a sigh, running his thumb over Valera’s knuckles.

“Were there any roads branching off this one?”

Valera remembers the somber line of trees along the road, the dank darkness at the bottom of this canyon. Not a single opening in their ranks.

“I don’t think so. I didn’t think so. We should turn back, who knows where this one leads.”

It leads back to his familiar Komsomol road, to the houses of his neighbours which they’ve passed not an hour earlier. By all appearances, it’s the same road, if not for the fact that the trees blocking it were there when they were heading out, and then weren’t.

He pauses when they reach his house. “Let’s have some tea.”

The stubborn furrow of Boris’s brow is answer enough, but Boris redundantly says, “No, let’s check the other exit from the village, just so that we are clear.”

Knowing a lost fight when he sees one but never seeing that as a good reason to stop, Valera says, “I don’t want to go.”

Boris reaches out and touches his hand again. “Don’t be afraid. I’m right here.”

“I’m not afraid, I’m just tired and cold.” Actually, he’s not as tired as he expected he’d be, but the part about the cold is true enough: he can no longer feel his toes. As to the first part, he’s just baffled, is all. He wouldn’t go so far as to say he was afraid.

“Stomp your feet.” Boris demonstrates, and Valera reluctantly repeats after him until blood starts running in his toes again. “All better?”

Valera nods.

“Come on then. It’s not like you can catch pneumonia and die here.”

“You don’t ‘catch’ pneumonia, it develops-”

“I’m sure you know all about it, Professor.”

They start walking towards the farther end of the village, towards the suspension bridge connecting his side of the village to the center, such as it were.

“I’m not for a second entertaining your idea, but what do you think did you in?” Valera finally asks.

“My heart.”

Valera laughs, clouds of mist escaping from his mouth into the frosty air. “I’m sorry, that makes you sound like a sensitive little damsel from a 19th century novel. I knew you were a sensitive soul deep down.”

He pauses after the first step onto the bridge, where the ropes dance under their weight.

"Boris- What happened to me?"

Boris looks at him with terrible, unspeakable sympathy. "You hanged yourself." Holding onto the railing with one hand, Boris reaches out with the other to touch his neck, intact but for that one sore spot where he nicked himself shaving. "Your spine wasn't broken, so that must have taken a long time. It's not a good way to go."

"Better than the radiation sickness," he says, swallowing. He can feel his pulse race under Boris's fingers, and after a second, Boris tucks his scarf closer.

On the other side, they meet Valera’s acquaintance who lent him the baby so that he could buy more hake. Valera greets baby Natasha and thanks the man profusely: the extra helping of fish did come in useful after all.

“Don’t I know his face from somewhere?” Boris asks, frowning, when they continue their journey. “I’m sure I’ve seen him.”

They walk past the store (closed), past the village council (deserted), past the school (a mural of cheerful pioneers disappearing under snow), and soon enough they are ensconced in the forest again.

“This place gives me the chills,” Valera finally admits. “It’s too quiet.”

The wide asphalted road turns bumpy under their feet, as if there was nothing but trodden earth underneath the snow, then the trees start moving in closer, as if they were following a mere woodpath rather than the road connecting the village to civilization, and then the trees close around them like a pine box.

“There’s no road,” Valera admits.

“No.”

“Doesn’t mean anything.”

“Really?”

Really, Valera wants to say. He turns around, looking up at the pale narrow sliver of the sky above. It might snow again later today.

“Let me try something,” Boris says, and pulls a revolver out of the coat pocket.

“What the hell,” Valera gasps. “That wasn’t there in the morning.”

Boris checks the gun professionally, reminding Valera of the past he has that Valera’s only vaguely aware of. Squinting with one eye, he fires at the closest spruce. An avalanche of snow falls crashing to the ground. Boris nods, grim determination on his face.

“What are you-”

Before he can say anything else, the gun is pressed to Boris’s temple, and another shot rings out. Sounds die fast here, swallowed down by the horrible stillness of the forest, but Valera is afraid to open his eyes, doesn’t want to see, doesn’t-

Boris’s lips are on his, insistent and wet, and this kiss is so much better than their first. Valera clasps his shoulders to still his shaking hands, breathes out in between kisses,

“You are an absolute madman.”

“I’m an avowed pragmatist,” Boris says with mock indignation. “Just a dead one.”

They turn and walk slowly back to the village.

Vasyl greets them in passing when they enter the village, and it’s the first time Valera sees him wearing a uniform. There are dark dried splashes on it, and weird insignia fashioned out of bomb shells. Not anything Valera recognizes.

“I fought guys like him,” Boris whispers, following him suspiciously with his gaze as they pass.

“Well, if that makes you feel any better, he suggested last night that we bury you out in the woods.”

Boris goes red, moves his jaw as if he was chewing on anger, but then lets out a laugh. “Fair’s fair, I guess.”

Boris stops in front of the monument to the unknown soldier.

“Unknown- bullshit. If they bothered to record the names properly, if they bothered to arm them properly, if they gave a rat’s arse about the lives of-”

“Tea,” Valera says. “Come on, I still have some chocolate butter, even if it’s not very good.”

He tucks his hand in the crook of Boris’s arms and tugs him back, towards home.

“I think I know what it is,” Boris says with a sigh. “Everything crossed out of history, everything too painful to talk about, everything people didn’t want to remember. The dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue.”

Miraculously, the store is open this time, despite it being a Friday.

“It’s not that bad, really. Not when you get right down to it,” Valera says, pulling on the store’s door.

They buy some hard candy, stuck and frozen together into a colorful lump that shines like something out of a fairytale.

“It is that bad,” Boris picks up again when they are back outside. “But it’s all we have. And we are all they have, that issue, those that will join us later. So we all make do. That’s all there is to it.”

Before the bridge, Valera stops dead in his tracks.

“What.” Boris says, and smiles, apparently remembering all the other times he’s said that.

He opens and closes his mouth a couple of times, unable to get the words out, before finally saying, “Am I remembered, Boria?” It feels terribly vain, but the dead are allowed their vanity. Please lie, he thinks. You are good at it.

Boris shakes his head and pulls him into a hug.

“Then why am I here?” Valera asks against his coat.

“Well, I guess you are part of this land’s history now too, remembered or not.”

The snow starts to fall, slowly at first.

"We should get home before it turns into a blizzard,” he says, reluctantly letting Boris go. His foot poised over the bridge, he says, “Maybe it's like in _Master and Margarita_. He does not deserve the light-"

"I don’t read your samizdat,” Boris interrupts him gruffly, then breaks into a smile that lights up the entire bleak day. “He doesn’t deserve the light, he deserves peace. Something like that, anyway." 

 

_Пам’яті всіх, кого позбавили права,_  
пам’яті всіх, кого викреслили зі списків,  
пам’яті всіх, кого випалила серпнева заграва,  
кому за жодних режимів не ставитимуть обелісків,  
пам’яті тих, кого викинули за кордони,  
пам’яті тих, хто говорив із зашитими вустами,  
пам’яті тих, хто залишився на лінії оборони  
пливуть небеса цього ранку,  
пливуть над містами. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * If HBO can stick whole chunks of untranslated poetry into their multimillion production, then so can I into a fic. The poem is by Serhiy Zhadan, and can be read [here](https://dereferer.me/?https%3A//www.facebook.com/serhiy.zhadan/posts/1054179624630305/).  
> * M&M wasn't technically samizdat by that stage (just heavily censored & with a slight whiff of ideological subversion), but it sounds funnier this way. Obviously, that's the source both of the title and of the "house I was given as a reward" line.  
> * Historical!Shcherbina didn't literally fight the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (because that's what "KGB agents sure used to disappear a lot in the Carpathians" + weird insignia stands for, btw), but he was indeed organizing ideological work in the region at the height of its activities.  
> * “The dead men gnawing the dead man, in the abyss without issue” is from _The Terrible Vengeance_ by Nikolai Gogol.
> 
> Thank you for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * ["Am I remembered?"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23055130) by [jedi_katalina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jedi_katalina/pseuds/jedi_katalina)




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